Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Lenovo Laptop - Printing numbers instead of Letters

Recently faced an issue with my laptop keyboard; it was typing numbers instead of characters in Yahoo messenger. Only the first letter of the user id would appear on the screen as letter, the rest of the characters will be replaced by the sequence of numbers in a cyclic order (1-9-0-1)

Such issues might be caused by a number of reasons like virus and trojans or just having your Num lock Key on - this could happen in IBM/Lenovo laptops by pressing the Fn and Num keys together. But there is one other issue that comes with Lenovo laptops - they come with special utiltiy programs that help in protecting the PC from trojans, hackers, bots and keyloggers. One of their updates had isntalled an application called, GID Desktop Application on Start up. This application is by StrikeForce Technologies Inc.

The command goes like this : C:\Program Files\SFT\GuardedID\gidd.exe /s

This program, prevents prospective keyloggers from capturing the sequence of characters that are typed. Something might have happened which might make this application treat a normal app like Firefox or Yahoo messenger as key logger and it hinders its working by faking keystrokes with numbers on those applications.

GIDD loads on startup and hence you wouldn't find this issue when running your PC in safe-mode. You can prevent the program from loading at start up by by unchecking it via Control Panel/System and Security/Administrative Tools/System Configuration Startup tab or using msconfig utility in Windows.

Hope this tweak / tip comes useful for somebody in need. Please post your comments on how you liked this posting.